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rewrites. He was in prison. They got him on a string of burglaries. He was rather good, to hear him tell it. He would go in at night when the weather was warm. People would leave their windows open and he would slice through the screens. It didn’t matter to him if someone was home—he was quiet, and he went in and out fast. Then one night someone woke up—a bruiser of a man, drove a garbage truck, I think—and he snuck up on Beccanti with a baseball bat. So then the police had him. He’d never been caught before, so he thought he might get away with probation. But the cops knew all about him. It turns out he always cut the screens the same way—he’d slice them along the top, then along the bottom, then once diagonally, like a Z. So they had a thick file on him. They had him for thirty-one break-ins. They even had a nickname for him. They called him Zorro.”
    Kristoll stared straight ahead as he spoke. Loogan watched him from the passenger seat.
    “He got out of the state prison in Jackson a year ago. Came back to Ann Arbor. He called me, very respectful, asked if we could meet. We had lunch. He talked about how hard it was, adjusting. His parole officer had found him a job stocking shelves somewhere, which he hated. I got the sense he wanted me to help him find something better. I liked him, but I wasn’t going to hire him, and there was no one I felt comfortable recommending him to. He didn’t press it. I saw him after that occasionally. Once he came to the office with a new story. I gave him some money for it, though we never published it.
    “Then tonight he came to the house. He was sorry to bother me at home, he said, but he needed to speak to me about something important. I let him in. It didn’t seem like a risk. We went into the study and he started talking about this woman he’d met. He took a while to come to the point, but the point was he’d gotten her pregnant. Now there were medical bills. He needed money. Five thousand dollars, he said. I don’t know how he came up with that figure. I think he was just trying to see what he could get. I told him I didn’t have five thousand to give him. He smiled at that, as if he was genuinely surprised. Living in a house like mine, on the river? I couldn’t put together five thousand dollars?
    “Well, the truth is the house is mortgaged, and most of the income from Gray Streets goes right back into the business. Laura brings home more from her job at the university than I net from the magazine. I didn’t go into this with him. I just made it clear there wasn’t going to be any five thousand. I was sorry about his situation, but there was nothing I could do for him. He never got agitated, never raised his voice, but he wouldn’t let it go. It could be a loan, he said. I refused. I made some suggestions about public assistance, Medicaid. But by then it had dawned on me that his whole story was probably a lie. He didn’t need money for medical bills. In the end I called him on it. ‘There’s no woman, is there?’ I said. His manner changed then. He laughed.
    “It was a short burst of a laugh, a momentary loss of control. He clamped down on it quickly, and after that he said nothing, as if he had decided the time for talking was over. He was sitting in a chair in the study and I was across from him. He leaned over and started pulling at his pant leg. I saw the leather, the metal. My mind made the relevant connections. Holster. Gun. The bottle was on the table beside me—I had offered him a drink when he came in. Then I was on my feet. He was fumbling around at his ankle, I think the gun might have caught on something. The bottle was in my hand. I drew my arm back, swung it at the side of his head. I thought the bottle would shatter. It didn’t shatter. I held it up in front of me, looking at the label upside down, marveling at it.
    “He was on the floor, on his hands and knees. The gun was under his hand. It wasn’t pointed at me. It didn’t